Last week, Dr. Steven Quay published recommendations to improve the integrity of the nation’s biosecurity research following the Covid-19 crisis. Dr. Quay is a prominent figure in the resistance to the Covid-19 origins coverup in addition to his medical and academic pedigrees.
His recommendations complement those of James Erdman, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence and CIA professional, who articulated before Congress in April that the government’s biosecurity apparatus is convoluted, clumsy, and unaccountable. I echoed similar comments in a prior piece from my perspective as a military officer also involved in countering the coverup. In the vein of Dr. Quay and Mr. Erdman’s recommendations, I offer further comments towards America’s Covid-19 post-mortem.
Dr. Quay makes five recommendations, two of which I’ll expand upon.
1. Review high-risk research through a federal “Life Sciences Research Security Board.” Any such board should include military officers (non-doctors) who are familiar with the overarching threat picture to the United States (to the highest classification), especially if the researchers propose to do this research for national security reasons, which is commonly the pitch. Uniformed officers can provide a degree of measure to the rationale for the research as compared to the entire threat picture. In the case of Covid, they would have assessed whether it was worth applying resources to risky research like that of the DEFUSE proposal in lieu of resourcing capabilities to counter China’s anti-access/area denial capability so the military can actually operate inside the first island chain in the Pacific. We do not need a SARS-related-CoV vaccine for troops in the western Pacific if we cannot even get our troops inside the threat ring to fight China. In hindsight, placing biodefense beneath NIAID in the early 2000s isolated it from uniformed military rigor, realism, and accountability. This board representation is probably the Joint Staff J3 himself or the J3 staff.
Before a new board is considered, perhaps placing biodefense back inside the military with military officer corps (not civilian DOW employee) oversight will be a more effective instrument. A comparable matter is that of autonomous weapons, which must be approved through the chain of command and ultimately by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before operational use is authorized. This process ensures that uniformed officers are the decision-makers and also that there is ultimately a single decision-maker who owns the decision, owns the risk, is responsible for execution, and is accountable if there are screwups.
Like the Covid-19 response, where there is no single individual decision-maker responsible for the response (in violation of the nation’s principle of Unity of Command and every other intelligence and military operation that the United States conducts), a board cannot be held accountable if there are mistakes made with the approved research. This especially applies if the intelligence community intends to leverage foreign research for collections, which again raises the appropriate resourcing questions, as well as induces operational risk to assess (in the case of Covid, the risk being that the IC contributes to the coverup possibly because it is so intertwined with the research it leveraged but failed to supervise).
2. Build targeted surveillance where risk concentrates: airports, seaports, city wastewater systems, live-animal markets, and communities near high-containment laboratories. I do not disagree with this point. I do disagree with the biosecurity community’s near-obsession with doing surveillance everywhere. We do not need to know everywhere the pathogen is. We need to know how to treat it. The problem is not that it exists and spreads. The problem is that it can potentially make some people sick. Spread is not a tangible thing and therefore cannot be a tangible threat. In the Covid response, this error in framing led to multi-generational consequences as authorities sought to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
What is actually needed is reconnaissance. Reconnaissance is a step above surveillance. Surveillance cues reconnaissance. The intent is to glean specific meaningful information that informs the analysis of potential solutions, not just where to push hospital supplies. In the case of a disease, we want to know its pathology, the type of person it infects and the type of person who gets ill (in the words of Hippocrates), and other details. There are locations revealed by Covid that naturally serve this purpose, like cruise ships, US warships, and the recruit depots. For instance, by March of 2020, SARS-COV-2 had gone through a cruise ship and aircraft carrier upon which infection rates, pathology, and the type of person who got ill from it could be gleaned.
By April recruits under study in Parris Island provided further information, primarily that young people got no more sick from Covid than from the regular cruds, if it had any impact on them at all. The Depot also exposed so many vectors of SARS-COV-2 variants that it sparked legitimate inquiry into whether SARS-COV-2 was being deliberately seeded worldwide. The alternative explanation was that everyone had already been exposed via community spread nationwide (critical info, ignored at the time, that should have informed problem framing).
The point is that bio-reconnaissance should be incorporated into biosecurity activities to inform how to treat the people who do become sick. Ultimately, there is no need for any other measures if the illness is treatable.
The purpose of surveillance and reconnaissance is to inform problem analysis. In the military, and in US doctrine, this is called problem framing or mission analysis and is the first step in the nation’s planning processes. It is unclear even after six years whether this doctrinal process occurred with the rigor standard to America’s everyday operational rhythm. Some observations in this vein:
(1) Flaws in PanCAP COVID-19 Government Response Plan. The closest product to an operational plan is the Pandemic Crisis Action Plan (PanCAP) produced in March 2020. The PanCAP is considered a plan but is really the Coordinating Instructions subparagraph of the Execution paragraph in an Annex C Operations. The “plan” is not oriented to the threat but rather to coordinating government to execute pre-planned procedures. There is a description of Covid-19 but not a problem definition. The Annex B Intelligence – where the threat is defined in detail in American planning doctrine – is absent. The closest thing to a threat definition is in a footnote on page 79, where the CDC categorization of SARS-CoV-2’s threat is stated.
(2) Errant Framing. Absent thorough problem framing, authorities described the problem as disease “spread.” Again, disease “spread” is not a tangible thing and cannot be a tangible threat.
(3) Accurate Framing. The true problem was the illness SARS-CoV-2 presented to some people. The illness is a thing, but the virus is the actual tangible thing that caused the problem (note that a virus causing illness in an individual is a radically different frame in scope and scale than continental spread). The virus is a ~30,000-nucleotide genome of amino acids. It is its genome that is further derived into the attributes that cause its pathology.
(4) Precise Framing. This derivation is the conduct of problem framing practiced to the nation’s standard. Compare the lack of problem derivation towards Covid to the detail required to execute a bomber strike on a hidden door half a world away or the detail required to penetrate state defenses and capture a dictator. The absence of equivalent analysis with Covid highlights severe flaws in the nation’s public health and “biosecurity” apparatus. Less onus should be spent on logistics, stockpiling, and other biodefense “Apollo” projects until the mechanisms are in place to properly problem solve.
(5) There was no J3, or Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations, in the pandemic response architecture. The table of organization for Operation WARP SPEED shows no J3. There is no J3 assigned in the PanCAP. There was thus no one responsible for collating public and classified information, driving intelligence collections, problem framing, and then preparing courses of action with risk assessment for leadership to decide upon.
These functions appear sporadically spread across numerous entities and are unfamiliar to most of the personnel involved. These functions are not performed by a doctor or scientist. They are also not performed by the National Security Council. Many public health leaders complained that they did not know who was in charge. The void they felt was the absence of the J3. Military officers on the Joint Staff should perform this function in the future, if not the Joint Staff J3 itself.
(6) Planning is continuous and so is problem framing. As the threat evolves (and a virus is alive and adapts), reframing must occur to discern the new nature of the threat and whether the course of action remains appropriate. The professional military is aware that no contingency plans were made in the event that the mass vaccination campaign was unsuccessful. Mass vaccination mid-pandemic driving viral adaptation is a known outcome, so the argument that this could not have been predicted is unsound. An actual risk assessment would have highlighted this potential.
(7) There is no indication that professional risk analysis occurred. The risk matrix in the PanCAP is oriented to the challenges of interagency coordination. Like the “plan” itself, the risk assessment is neither oriented to the threat (which should have been included in the Annex B) nor oriented to the course of action (Lockdown and mass vaccination). There is a great deal of public and classified information and analysis down to the finest genetic level that should have been considered in problem analysis, course of action (COA) development, and risk assessment. Due to the coverup but also this flawed process, the government proved incapable of drawing actual meaningful information gleaned from the intelligence apparatus into its problem framing, course of action development, and risk assessment.
(8) The vaccines as the solution were determined before problem analysis. In military lexicon, the COA was chosen before problem framing.
(9) A repeated, enormous sin of the coverup is the use of strategic intelligence capability to learn of information sitting on American government share drives, at American nonprofits, or at American universities. The primary example is the EcoHealth Alliance DEFUSE proposal to DARPA, which I observed on the top secret JWICS network and reported to investigators. The trigger for DARPA uploading DEFUSE to JWICS was an intelligence report that reported the existence of the DEFUSE proposal, knowledge gleaned from strategic intelligence capability. DEFUSE sat on unclassified share drives since 2018 and was unreported for 1.5 years once SARS-CoV-2 emerged.
A theme of these observations is the cost of coverup. Coverup fouled the nation’s problem-solving. A lack of integrity among individuals led to poor institutional conduct, which further compromised the problem-solving process. Another observation then is that these three integrities must be reconciled to restore virtue to how the country solves problems and how the country will solve biothreat problems in the future.
Dr. Quay’s recommendations strengthen the integrity of bioresearch. Mr. Erdman noted the lack of integrity in the intelligence and biosecurity apparatus. My observations here highlight deficiencies in institutional and process integrity. Ideally these observations are ultimately captured in an after action review (AAR). Recent indictments and vaccine mandate reviews show that there is legal and criminal accountability underway. There were some Congressional efforts but there is no actual official AAR for Covid-19.
An AAR, or debrief, is the last phase of American operational planning and execution. Not doing one degrades the integrity of the entire matter. So a final recommendation is to do an actual AAR, regardless of how uncomfortable, and especially relevant given the negative impact of the coverup on the matter. Doing so would be an enormous stride towards finding American integrity after the harms of the Covid crisis.
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